§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns providing product information in an online environment. In particular, the present invention concerns determining complementary product content from primary product document information and providing such complementary product content in association with the primary product document, in an online environment.
§1.2 Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as an effective way to advertise and influence users. Interactive advertising provides opportunities for advertisers to target their ads to a receptive audience. That is, targeted ads are more likely to be useful to end users since the ads may be relevant to a need inferred from some user activity (e.g., relevant to a user's search query to a search engine, relevant to content in a document requested by the user, etc.). Query keyword targeting has been used by search engines to deliver relevant ads. For example, the AdWords™ advertising system by Google, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. (referred to as “Google”), delivers ads targeted to keywords from search queries. Similarly, content targeted ad delivery systems have been proposed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/314,427 (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '427 application”), titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; and Ser. No. 10/375,900 (incorporated by reference and referred to as “the '900 application”), titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors, describe methods and apparatus for serving ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example. Content targeted ad delivery systems, such as the AdSense™ advertising system by Google for example, have been used to serve ads on Web pages.
As can be appreciated from the foregoing, serving ads relevant to concepts of text in a text document and serving ads relevant to keywords in a search query are useful because such ads presumably concern a current user interest. Consequently, such online advertising has become increasingly popular.
Businesses are increasingly incorporating e-commerce methods in their overall business strategies. E-commerce (e.g., electronic commerce) involves the buying, selling and advertising of goods and services on the Internet. Similarly, e-commerce enabled advertising systems have been proposed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/424,516 (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '516 application”), titled “ECOMMERCE-ENABLED ADVERTISING,” filed on Jun. 15, 2006 and listing David Chung as the inventor describes methods and apparatus for serving e-commerce enabled ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example.
When purchasing a product or service from an online merchant (“the primary merchant”), e-commerce consumers might want to purchase a complementary product and/or service not offered by the merchant. Thus, it would be useful to (1) provide such consumers with an opportunity to purchase such complementary products and/or services, and (2) provide secondary merchants with the opportunity to sell such complimentary products and/or services. However, the primary merchant will not want to jeopardize its own sale to such a consumer. Thus, it would be useful to provide such consumers with an opportunity to purchase such complementary products and/or services in a way that would not jeopardize the primary merchant's sale, and indeed, in a way that might provide a benefit to the primary merchant.